World

I met Stephen Lennon/Tommy Robinson once, in Luton. Dreadful place – I’d wear a niqab just to reduce my view of the appalling architecture (like in Birmingham, the hub of the town is a shopping centre surrounded by a sort of ring road). I never liked the organisation’s tactics, nor am I completely sure of what their aims were, but as Lennon described it – of people openly recruiting for the Taliban while his classmates were off in the Army – the anger was understandable. In Luton, in particular, the Labour government also funded mosques in a way that was bound to lead to resentment among the white working class.

The London School of Economics (LSE) has been in the news recently thanks to a certain ex-lecturer who was a Marxist. But while Marxism retains some grip at faculty level in the LSE, it is — like many other universities — another variety of extremism that increasingly dictates events at student level. At last week’s LSE Freshers’ Fair — as Student Rights document here — the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society were threatened with physical removal after being discovered to have t-shirts deemed to be — wait for it — ‘offensive’. Told to cover themselves up or face removal, the atheists were informed that their t-shirts might even be considered ‘harassment’.

Israel’s Prime Minister revealed a crucial truth about the foreign policy of the United Kingdom and our allies in his speech to the United Nations, the gravity of which is difficult to overstate.  His speech affirmed once more that when it comes to Iran, we and all our allies are negotiating under the cover of Israel’s credibility alone. Mr Netanyahu rightly dispensed with diplomatic charades to speak explicitly about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.  If you believe President Rouhani’s lies from the same podium that there isn’t one, no Western or Arab government agrees with you.  This is not Iraq or even Syria.  As it happens, these country names evoke something rather

   Amman — Beirut — Istanbul I recently bumped into a senior officer with the rebel Free Syrian Army who was waiting in the passport queue at the Turkish border. I didn’t recognise him at first, out of uniform and without his entourage, and I told him so. He was following the example of the 7th-century Second Caliph, Omar bin al Khattab, he replied. The caliph was so humble he took turns with his servant riding a horse to Jerusalem to receive the city’s surrender. There was no imagery from Islamic history when I first met the officer a year ago. He was one of those ‘rebels’ western officials have

Barack Obama may not be a great president, but he is a wizard at the blame game. He has fought ‘fiscal brinkmanship’ battles throughout his presidency, and he tends to come out on top. America’s federal government is today closing down, and most pundits refuse to say it’s in any way the president’s fault. Instead, they accuse his opponents of wrecking the political system. If you read most newspapers, or watch the BBC, you would think that wicked Republicans — ‘in hock’ to their extremist tea party division —  are shutting down the federal government out of little more than a fit of pique. The Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,

Hillary Clinton is overwhelming favourite to be America’s next President  – and this time nobody, especially not no pesky filmmaker, will get in her way. Charles Ferguson, who was working on a major new documentary about Hillary, has just announced that he’s cancelled the project. The reason? Apparently, the American political class didn’t approve. The film was absolutely not a right-wing hit job. It was being made for CNN, for starters. And Ferguson is a bona-fide progressive who has made edgily bien-pensant movies about the Iraq War and the financial crash. Indeed, the Republican National Convention assumed his work would be so fellatory towards Mrs C that it threatened to boycott CNN until the

Last week I wrote in the Observer about Qatar’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers, who will build the stadiums and hotels for the 2022 World Cup. They were dying at a rate of one day. They had to cope with inhuman conditions and labour laws that treated them as serfs by giving employers the power to break contracts and stop them leaving the country if they complained. The absolute Qatari monarchy ran a kind of apartheid system, I said. It denied rights it granted the natives to poor workers from Nepal and India. If the image of the old South Africa did not appeal, I offered Sparta

Is Iran serious? That is the question everybody has been asking for the last 24 hours since the new Iranian President went to the UN in New York and gave an interview to CNN. A colossal outbreak of wilful optimism has followed from policy makers, ex-policy makers and media. This has been based largely on the fact that an Iranian President may have just acknowledged that the Holocaust of European Jewry occurred. Well huzzah. For what it’s worth, President Rouhani didn’t quite say that. In the CNN interview he said that it was the job of historians to look at such things. And to the extent that he acknowledged that a

Mr Steerpike was tucking into half a dozen oysters in the Grand Hotel in Brighton when none other than Lord Kinnock tottered by. What did the old socialist firebrand make of his ideological son’s big speech? ‘I thought it was magnificent,’ the former leader turned EU millionaire peer gushed. ‘Practical patriotism, practical patriotism!’ Like father, like son. I’m also happy to report that his lordship has managed to keep his derrière out of the sea on this trip to Brighton. Well done, sir!

The last month and a half has seen perhaps the worst anti-Christian violence in Egypt in seven centuries, with dozens of churches torched. Yet the western media has mainly focussed on army assaults on the Muslim Brotherhood, and no major political figure has said anything about the sectarian attacks. Last week at the National Liberal Club there was a discussion asking why the American and British press have ignored or under-reported this persecution, and (in some people’s minds) given a distorted narrative of what is happening. Among the four speakers was the frighteningly impressive Betsy Hiel of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who has spent years in Egypt and covered Iraq and Afghanistan.

Borders matter less than they used to. That’s not always apparent in this country protected as it is by the sea but on the continent frontiers are, once again, increasingly arbitrary and meaningless lines on a map. Modern Europe, in this respect, is beginning to look like an older Europe. Consider the new German invasion of the east. Invasion is, of course, too hysterical a term. Nevertheless, according to this fascinating Bloomberg report, (hat-tip: Tyler Cowen) increasing numbers of German pensioners are moving to Poland and elsewhere in search of more affordable care to ease them through their final years. Not quite lebensraum then but you get the idea. As many as one in

  Beirut News that the Syrian regime has agreed to hand in its arsenal of chemical weapons is a great relief to Lebanon. For the past few weeks we have been wandering around like inmates on death row, fearing that a US-led strike would ignite a potentially apocalyptic conflict between Hezbollah and Israel or at the very least provoke a prolonged internal Shia-Sunni terror campaign. This was no idle fear. The salvos fired at the end of August brought back memories of the darkest days of the civil war. But Lebanon is still not in the clear, especially as a framework for handing over the chemical weapons still needs to be